Despite voicing its support for the settlement of the Ukrainian crisis, the US is actually working to undermine the Minsk peace deal, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said, commenting on the deployment of American military instructors to Ukraine.

The Russian Foreign
Ministry is “gravely concerned” by the fact that
military instructors from the US, UK and Canada will be training
the troops from Ukraine’s National Guard, stressed the ministry’s
spokesman, Aleksandr Lukashevich.

“This begs the question: Do they – in Washington, London and
Ottawa – understand whom are we talking about? As they are the
same Ukrainian ultra-nationalists from volunteer battalions, who
wore Nazi emblems and blurred themselves with the blood of women,
children and the elderly during reprisal raids in Donbass
[south-eastern Ukraine],” he said.

“What will these foreign
military experts teach them – how to continue killing those, who
speak Russian?”the
spokesman wondered.

Moscow views the information that the National Guard training
program will include exercises with Western-style weaponry and
hardware as a possible “first step towards the supply of
modern US arms to Ukraine, which the ‘party of war’ in Kiev is so
eager to get its hands on,” he said.

Supporting any revanchist ambitions of warmongers in the
Ukrainian government “may lead to the resumption of
bloodshed” in the south-east of the country, Lukashevich
warned.

The ministry believes that the US actions are in violation of the
peace deal, which was signed by Kiev and the representatives of
Donetsk and Lugansk during talks in Minsk on February 12, he
said.

Lukashevich stated that the Minsk deal provides “the
withdrawal of all foreign forces, military equipment, as well as
mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under the supervision
of the OSCE. Instead, a US Airborne Brigade has landed near Lvov
and intends to settle there for long.”

“The Obama administration, which verbally advocates the
settlement of the Ukrainian crisis, is, in fact, contributing to
the disruption of the Minsk agreements,” he stressed.

According to Moscow, Washington is trying to divert the
international community’s attention from its military deployment
in the Ukraine “by a ‘smokescreen’ of claims of an alleged
presence of Russian troops in Donbass,” which hasn’t been
backed by any proof.

“It’s obvious, that the US troops on Ukrainian soil won’t
bring it peace,” Lukashevich concluded.

On Friday, paratroopers of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade, based
in Vincenza, Italy, have arrived in western Ukraine to provide
training for Ukrainian troops. Some 290 US troops are to take
part in long-term joint drills with combat units of the National
Guard, Arsen Avakov, Ukrainian Interior Minister, wrote on
Facebook.

The US paratroopers’ training mission will last for 24 weeks and
involve some 900 Ukrainian servicemen, Ukraine's President, Petro
Poroshenko, and US Vice-President, Joe Biden, agreed earlier in
spring.

Kiev and rebels signed a ceasefire deal in February, which
involved the pullout of heavy weapons and a profound political
dialogue and constitutional reform, which would address the
grievances of the dissenting regions and reintegrate them into
Ukraine.

The deal has more or less held so far, with the level of violence
in eastern Ukraine dropping significantly, OSCE monitors on the
ground have been reporting.

The Ukrainian conflict began in April 2014 after Kiev sent troops
to Donetsk and Lugansk Region as people there refused to
recognize the new coup-imposed authorities in the capital. A year
of fighting in south-eastern Ukraine has resulted in over 6,000
deaths, including score of civilians, according to conservative
UN estimates.